Adobe Connect Now Works Without Flash

Adobe has been talking about their plans toward full HTML5 support for some time. Last year they began publicly talking about their strategy to this end and hinting at some of the engineering and business decisions they have been having to balance along the way. Today Adobe finally announced that in their new release for Adobe Connect (Connect 9.5.2) they are now introducing a Flash free option for customers who don’t have the Flash plug-in set up or turned on in their browsers.

If you work in an environment that prohibits Flash or are in this category by choice, this add-on removes Flash as a barrier to entering Adobe Connect meetings, virtual classrooms, or webinars from environments that prohibit the use of Flash. This is great news as more applications are moving away from Flash and browsers are no longer supporting Flash.Access is simple as downloading and installing the Adobe Connect add-in when prompted. Once installed, the add-in will thereafter automatically launch for all of your subsequent Adobe Connect meetings.

Additionally, Adobe Connect 9.5.2 release allows customers the ability to move a seminar room to a different license, which means if you originally expected 100 registrants, say, and your seminar became an overnight hit with hundreds more registering – you’re able to move your room to a 1,000 seat license folder without changing the URL or any of the event details. The release notes show that you can’t wait until the last minute though… A room can’t be moved to a larger license within 45 minutes of its scheduled start time. This is also a welcome change.

Adobe tells us that while the technological underpinning of Connect has yet to fundamentally change, that change is on the horizon. Other web conferencing and webcasting vendors who rely on Flash better be in serious development on alternate enabling technologies.